Better Never Stops: Meet Garrett Johnson

As Chief Happiness Officer, I spend a surprising amount of time trying to understand the humans who work here. This is partly because culture is literally in my job description and partly because humans are fascinating creatures who will voluntarily sign up for obstacle races, buy books they do not have time to read, and then describe themselves as relaxing.

Garrett Johnson does all three.

Garrett is Cracked Egg Creative's Chief Technology Officer, which means he is responsible for the technology behind a company whose name suggests we may have already broken something. This requires confidence.

I went into our conversation expecting a lot of code, AI and developer talk. There was plenty of that, but the technology turned out to be the least interesting way to explain him. Garrett's career makes much more sense when you start with the thing underneath it: he has always been intensely curious, deeply competitive and almost constitutionally incapable of believing that the current version of something has to be the final one.

That combination has taken him from the Navy to art school, from web development to SaaS architecture, from drawing to artificial intelligence, and from competing against other people to competing mostly against the person he was yesterday.

His department motto is three words: “Better Never Stops.” By the end of the interview, I realized it could just as easily be the title of his biography.

The Career Path That Makes Perfect Sense Once You Hear It

Garrett's story does not begin with a computer. It begins with competition. Growing up, he wanted to be good at whatever he was doing, whether that meant sports, school or learning something new. He wasn't necessarily chasing a particular career yet. He was chasing improvement.

That instinct eventually led him into the United States Navy, where he served as an electrician. The work taught him discipline, accountability and how to solve problems when the stakes were considerably higher than a website refusing to behave. He later volunteered for the Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure team, taking on additional training and responsibility simply because the challenge was there.

He still considers that one of the accomplishments he is proudest of. What stayed with him was not only what he accomplished, but the fact that he chose a challenge he was never required to accept. It taught him that growth often begins when you voluntarily walk toward the thing that makes you uncomfortable.

Then his career took what looks, at first glance, like a hard left turn.

Garrett had always loved gaming, drawing and creating things, so after the Navy he pursued Game Art and Design. But the more he created, the more he realized he enjoyed building experiences as much as consuming them. When he discovered web development, several parts of his brain suddenly had somewhere to meet: creativity, logic, technology and problem solving.

He could start with an idea that existed nowhere except in someone's head and turn it into something another person could actually use. That hooked him.

Websites became applications. Applications became software. Software became SaaS platforms, integrations and increasingly complex technology ecosystems. Today, after roughly fifteen years in technology, Garrett architects platforms, builds AI-powered applications and leads technical teams. He is also the founder of LevelUp Web.

The path looks unconventional on paper. In conversation, it feels almost inevitable. The electrician learned how systems work. The artist learned how ideas become experiences. The developer learned how to make those experiences functional. The leader learned that the best technology is rarely about the technology itself.

Garrett did not abandon one version of himself each time he moved forward. He kept adding to it.

The Hardest Part of Building Software Isn't the Code

The hardest part of software development is often not writing the code. It is correctly identifying the business problem the technology needs to solve.

One of the most revealing things Garrett told me was that people consistently misunderstand what makes software development difficult. Writing the code can be complicated, of course, but he does not think it is usually the hardest part. The harder work happens before anyone should start building: understanding the actual problem.

A client may arrive asking for a website because a website is the solution they know how to name. But the business problem might be lead generation, a broken customer experience, disconnected systems, repetitive internal work or a process that has quietly become impossible to scale. Sometimes the right answer really is a website. Sometimes it is automation, an internal application, a SaaS platform, AI or an entirely different workflow.

Garrett's job, as he sees it, is not to make the business fit whatever technology happens to be fashionable. It is to understand the business well enough to determine which technology actually belongs there.

That requires listening before building. It requires asking better questions and occasionally telling someone that the thing they requested is not the thing that will solve their problem. An elegant solution to the wrong problem is still the wrong solution.

This is also why Garrett gets frustrated when businesses evaluate technology primarily by asking how cheaply they can get something built. He believes that frames the entire decision incorrectly. Technology can generate demand, eliminate repetitive work, improve operations, create better customer experiences and even open entirely new revenue streams. The useful question is not simply what it costs. It is what the investment makes possible.

A cheap website that does not help the business accomplish anything is not necessarily a bargain. It may simply be a less expensive way to buy the wrong thing.

This philosophy also shapes the way Garrett evaluates his own work. He knows a complex solution is successful when the experience feels simple to the person using it. If the user can accomplish what they came to do without having to think about everything happening behind the scenes, then the complexity stayed where it belonged.

That is an interesting standard for a technologist: the better the work, the less the customer may notice the technology at all.

Curiosity Has a Supercharger Now

Eventually we got to artificial intelligence, and this is where Garrett's enthusiasm becomes difficult to miss. He describes the current moment as feeling like “plugging into the Matrix.” After fifteen years of learning technologies the traditional way, AI has dramatically accelerated how quickly he can research, experiment, test ideas and build.

For someone already wired to ask what else might be possible, this is a dangerous amount of fun.

What excites Garrett is not the idea that AI will replace talented people. He rejects that premise. He sees AI as an amplifier: a tool that can help capable people move faster, explore more possibilities and spend less time on repetitive work. Creativity, critical thinking, judgment, problem solving and understanding human behavior still matter. In many ways, they matter more when the tools themselves become more powerful.

The speed is also what concerns him. Businesses are adopting AI because they feel pressure to “do AI,” sometimes before they have a strategy, clean data, proper oversight or even a clearly defined problem. Moving faster in the wrong direction is still moving in the wrong direction.

Garrett's position is neither fear nor blind enthusiasm. Learn it. Understand it. Use it where it creates real value. Keep humans responsible for judgment.

He believes the future belongs to the curious: people willing to embrace change, continuously learn and use tools like AI to amplify their creativity rather than fear them.

That belief explains why one piece of conventional business advice particularly irritates him: “If it isn't broken, don't fix it.” Garrett sees that as a reliable way to discover, eventually and painfully, that somebody else spent the last three years building something better while you were celebrating the fact that yours still technically worked.

By the time the old way is visibly broken, the market may already have moved.

His alternative is not change for the sake of change. It is ongoing curiosity. Is this still the best way? What has changed around us? What could we simplify? What could we automate? What can we do now that was not possible when this process was created?

Curiosity, Garrett believes, will always outperform complacency.

Better Never Stops

That brings us back to the motto.

“Better Never Stops” sounds good on a Technology department wall, but Garrett actually lives it in a fairly literal way. He naturally notices repetitive tasks and starts wondering why a human is still doing them. He looks at processes that technically work and wonders whether they could work better. He buys books and courses faster than he can finish them because apparently an unfinished stack of educational material does not discourage him from acquiring additional educational material.

This may be the most CTO guilty pleasure ever confessed to me.

Other people impulse-buy watches, golf clubs or something Instagram convinced them would change their lives at 11:47 p.m. Garrett looks at his available free time and apparently thinks what this situation really needs is another course.

It would be easier to make fun of him if it did not fit perfectly with everything else he told me.

Garrett defines being Built Different as refusing to become comfortable. It is not about being the smartest person in the room or chasing novelty just to look innovative. It is showing up willing to learn, challenge assumptions and become better than you were yesterday.

Technology makes that philosophy unavoidable. Frameworks change. Platforms evolve. Customer expectations move. Tools that seemed revolutionary become standard. Expertise has a shelf life if you stop feeding it.

Garrett has no interest in pretending he has reached the point where there is nothing left to learn.

Even his favorite keyboard shortcut betrays him.

CMD + SHIFT + R.

For the nontechnical among us, that is a hard refresh. It tells the browser to ignore the old cached version and load the newest one.

Of course it is his favorite.

Even his keyboard shortcut is essentially saying, “No, give me the latest version.”

I cannot improve upon that level of accidental brand consistency.

Apparently Rest Is Also Competitive

Once we moved outside work, I expected to uncover the calmer side of Garrett.

I did not.

He spends time with his family and coaches youth football, which initially sounded promising. Then he started listing the other things he enjoys: football, golf, baseball, basketball, HYROX, Spartan races and Savage races. He competes alongside his wife and likes pushing himself physically for many of the same reasons he pushes himself professionally.

I have concluded that Garrett and I define recreation differently.

My preferred athletic event is moving from one warm patch of sunlight to another. There are no registration fees.

The competitiveness Garrett had as a kid is still there, but its target has changed. He says he competes less with other people now and more with who he was yesterday. Can he learn something new? Solve a harder problem? Become stronger? Build something he could not have built before?

That makes his collection of interests feel less random. The race course, football field and development environment are all places where improvement is visible. There is always another skill to sharpen, another problem to solve, another version of yourself to test.

There is also an artist underneath all of it. Garrett still draws, a skill that might seem disconnected from his job until you consider how he defines creativity: “connecting ideas that most people never think to put together.”

That may be one of the best descriptions of his career.

Navy electrician and game artist. Developer and architect. Competitor and coach. Technologist and creative. The value is not in choosing one identity. It is in what happens when the different parts start informing one another.

When I asked which candy bar he would be, Garrett chose a Take 5 because he sees himself as a mix of creativity, discipline, competitiveness, curiosity and leadership: different ingredients that become better together.

I would normally object to someone turning a candy-bar question into a coherent personal philosophy.

Unfortunately, he made it work.

The Coach Behind the CTO

The part of our conversation that explained Garrett best had surprisingly little to do with technology.

One of the skills he is proudest of is coaching and mentoring. Whether he is on a football field or working with a team, he likes helping people build confidence, improve their skills and accomplish something they were not sure they could do.

His definition of leadership follows the same idea: creating an environment where people can accomplish more than they thought they were capable of doing.

That tells you quite a bit about the kind of CTO he wants to be.

The goal is not to be the person with all the answers. It is not to build a team that cannot move without him. It is to create the conditions where talented people can stretch, learn and become more capable.

Suddenly the coach and the CTO do not feel like separate roles at all.

Different field. Same instinct.

I would like the record to show that I resisted making a football-field pun here for several seconds.

Garrett is also unwilling to compromise on integrity and quality. He would rather spend more time building something correctly than put his name on work he does not believe in. Combined with his appetite for experimentation, that creates an important balance: move forward, but do not confuse speed with carelessness.

Keep learning, but keep standards.

Challenge the familiar, but understand why.

Use the new tool, but solve the right problem.

Build better, but build something worth building.

Never Stop Learning

Toward the end of the interview, I asked Garrett what he would want someone to remember if they remembered only one thing from our conversation.

He did not choose a technology, accomplishment or title.

“Never stop learning.”

The moment you believe you have mastered something, he said, is the moment you stop growing.

Looking back over his career, that answer feels less like advice and more like an explanation.

Garrett went from electricity to art, from art to web development, from websites to software and SaaS, and from traditional development into a new era of AI-assisted building. Along the way he became a founder, leader, coach and mentor. None of those transitions required him to discard what came before. Each gave him another way to think.

He defines success as the result of consistent growth, not a destination. That is probably why “Better Never Stops” fits him so well. There is no magical point where the learning is complete, the technology is final, the process cannot improve or the person you are today is the best version you are capable of becoming.

There is simply the next question.

The next challenge.

The next thing worth learning.

And somewhere, probably before most of us have finished deciding whether the current version is good enough, Garrett is already wondering what the next one could become.

Which is exactly who you want leading technology at a company called Cracked Egg Creative.

Just do not ask him whether something is “fine the way it is.”

I have now conducted enough interviews here to know how that ends.

Hatch
Chief Happiness Officer
Cracked Egg Creative